


love me in the morning

by blueghosts



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Non-Famous, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Changing Tenses, Daddy Kink, Drug Abuse, Emotional Manipulation, Escort Service, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, Flashbacks, Heartbreak, Infidelity, M/M, Pining, Prostitute Zayn, Prostitution, Self-Harm, Smut, Spontaneous sex, Unhealthy Relationships, description with short bursts of dialogue, just a short story of emotionally taxing angst and dirty words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-24
Updated: 2018-05-24
Packaged: 2019-05-13 08:45:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14745629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueghosts/pseuds/blueghosts
Summary: It’s fun to pretend, and maybe he liked the idea of Harry thinking he was the only one. Maybe that was the fun he found in all this chaos. Maybe that was the power he found in remonstrance of Harry’s prowess, the ace tucked away under the fine silk of his sleeve to challenge Harry’s straight flush.(Or, Zayn is an escort that breaks all the rules for Harry, and Harry lets him.)





	love me in the morning

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this completely unaware that Zayn was about to release entertainer, and its eerily similar, and I think that’s very strange but very fucking cool. 
> 
> quickly written, loosely edited, it's a shambles but I hope you enjoy it. 
> 
> side note: if the tags and the clear representation of it throughout the story isn't enough, I'm aware that the relationship between the characters isn't healthy, and I'm not trying to romanticise in any way. I think it's cynically realistic of me to have the concept of this escort that isn't able to have a good relationship with anyone because of his profession but falling in love anyway. love isn't always fluff and clouds and happy dances with kisses in the rain, it can be brutal and harsh, too, because people fall in love even when they don't necessarily want to, the heart wants what it wants. so, please keep that in mind whilst reading, have an open-mind, this story is what love looks like when we aren't always looking through rose-tinted glasses. 
> 
>    
> To every other fanfic writer out there who’s fanfics have ever meant something to me in any way, who have prompted me to finally start posting my own work—thank you.)

 

 

The phone creates this shrill buzz that quakes the silence, and Zayn knows it’s _him_.

He knows it’s him before he even picks up the phone and brings the void of the line to his ear. It’s the inauspicious power of predictability, Zayn thinks, that grounds him to the spot, cements him like he’s a statue to the carpet of this dull and expensive Hilton room he’s found himself in. It’s the affliction at the thought of _his_ voice on the other end; and the deep desire to hear that husky tremble that keeps him stood there, torn, like he’s held up by string being pulled at either side of the room and captures his hands from reaching over and ending that God-awful _ring_ , that pounds into his skull.

Zayn knows what he’ll say. A strained and unconvincing ‘ _I can’t make it, the wife is home early,’_ a ‘ _works got me tied down like a fuckin’ puppet’_ again.

He knows it’s a lie, went out of his way to ask Jared to check her schedule earlier on; he knows she’ll be in Monaco for another week. It’s news that hits harder as that trickling of suspicion pulsed in his veins and gave him the sense that the haunting _ring, ring, ring_ of the hotel telephone was going to burst the seams of the room and blow out the candles. Wither the rose petals until they’re nothing but seeds of what could have been, of what he feels like he’s turning into as he stands there, cold and unattended and un-kissed.

And he was right. He always is. His mum always said he had a knack for that sort of thing. Intuition, some people call it. Zayn just calls it the talent of being able to tell when people are going to disappoint him. Because predictability is disappointing—it’s harrowing and brutal and sucks the colour from the good things in life. And as he looks around this stupid fucking hotel room, he sees the hue and the pigment melt away. The ceiling bubbles with heat and everything around him that’s held on for so long, much longer than he expected because everything has always been flames and heat and lust, just simmers into a flaccid pool of reality on the floor, and he splashes into it as he falls. Even the tumbler of whiskey in his palm is warm, slipping every few seconds from the sweat around his fingers, until Zayn gives up holding on and lets it scream across the expensive carpet he knows he won’t be paying for.

Zayn’s phone screen feels too bright as it pings, like the moon shining in from the sky and numbing the room with this amnesiac quality that seems to only make him feel harder.

 

_Please pick up the phone, I need to speak with you. I don’t think we should do this anymore. Just pick up the phone, Z._

 

His phone is out of his hand and cracking against the pavement outside before time seems to pass a moment.

It begins there, and he lets it go: the tense, red, flaming anger he’s felt burning in his bones for weeks, suppressed with the notion that it’s uncalled for, it’s not right, because how can your anger be right when you’re fucking a married man in hotel rooms once a week. Mirages of lust and hope that don’t exist outside of these deprecating walls filling him, despite the warning that he shouldn’t, this flicker of optimism in his lungs that is crushed with the first breath of bitter and polluted air he inhales outside, in the hallway outside room 142 that always seems too _fucking bright_ after hours of darkness and frisk and fickle affection.

It’s like a switch, like in those cartoons where the night turns to day with the click of a finger and the whole world spins out of place and becomes one blur.

He rips the duvet from the bed, yanks the cupboards from the drawers and hears them splinter across the walls, watches every bottle except the one in his hand shatter and stain the dull ambrosia of the paint. His fists become holes in the paintings, and the curtains just tangible pieces of feather as the wind scrapes through the French doors and tousles them about through the air and he gets tangled in the fine silk, until the lamps lose their light and cling to the floor with bounces of whines, and the whole room looks like a murder scene, with the bottle of Pinot Grigio and Moët red splayed across his feet, only, in a glimpse of a moment that shatters the energy he has left, Zayn wishes he was dead: he wishes he could make this a true scene with tape and a swarm of police and curious on-lookers to stare at his dead body that curls as it bounces out on the gurney.

It’s not like this is the first time—it’s the last he thinks hurts the most, always has. Zayn would rather Harry hurt him every time they meet, slap him and hit him and bruise him anywhere other than his neck or his thighs than not meet at all, because he’d rather be used and left coming down from that desiring inferno in the early mornings than be left cold all night. Because he’d rather be flown to the highest peak in the clouds and dropped back down than never leave the ground.

There’s no gain with no pain, but without Harry, Zayn fears there’s nothing. Just a black void. An entity in an empty hotel room, willing to scream but rising silent.

His knees hit the bathroom floor as the half bottle of Macallan and the dinner he scoffed down headily in the bar downstairs—so he wasn’t late to meet Harry, to touch him and have his hips left in bruises only Harry knows how to leave—spills down the toilet. He’s heaving, crying on the floor. He hates himself for wishing Harry to walk through the door and stroke his hair and tell him it’ll be alright. That he won’t be strolling his way down to The Penny to pick up a dirty whore in a back alley or a dirty room, instead of coming to him; instead of rolling up in that pretentious fucking Bentley Zayn has always hated but loves being fucked in, up against the seats so his skin peels from the leather in sweat and a _yes, yes, yes_ , just to get dressed and walk into a hotel room and do it all over again; instead of holding him and kissing him sweetly—to the side of his lips, his nose, his eyes, that delicate spot underneath his jaw that is tattooed with Harry’s name from the months and months of desperate, possessive hue he brandishes there, his lips brushing anywhere but against his in that way Harry knows makes him crave more, makes him grasp for his cock and pump and pant and shiver as his body papers against the walls or burns against the carpet or leaves sweaty indentations of his silhouette against the sheets.

He falls to the floor of the bathroom and curls up into a ball and cries. He cries and cries, ugly cries until there’s snot on his lips and his eyes are pathetically red and dry, and despite the taste of vomit and whiskey, he feels the linger of Harry’s toothpaste in his mouth, the phantasm of Harry’s warmth, of his touch, across his trembling back and sticky forehead and cold fingers.

Zayn thinks it was coming to this for a while, thinks he felt it deep down in his stomach for weeks, since the first time Harry bailed on him and left him in that hotel room alone, and he pulled strangers from the hall and shagged them until they forgot their names and Zayn forgot everything but Harry’s.

Until his words were bleak whispers that rang heavy in his mind. Until he scrubbed his skin so hard, to get the feeling of others off his skin he’d so desperately tried to paint on. He scrubbed his skin so hard that he bled. Until the phone rang again, and even though hearing Harry on his voicemail with that concerned glimmer on his lips felt like blades of ice penetrating his chest and licking across the surface of his heart, he left him with no answer, left him with the headache he’d given to Zayn since they’d met with no cure.

It’s the same now, as Zayn lays in the silence, the tiles cold against his flushed and dry cheeks. He thinks, in a fleeting moment, that he hears the crackle of his ringtone from the street outside, and it’s followed by the crackle of the hotel telephone, _ringing and ringing and ringing_ until the line won’t let it go on for any longer, and Zayn knows it’s him.

He lets it drone on and fade away. And when it stops and starts again, he rips the chord from the wall and falls against the bed and listens to the uneven sound of his heart as his body racks with humiliating sobs. _Go away, just go away._

The phone is wireless. It still rings.

The panels of the wall crack as they ricochet the screams of his betrayal, not daring to let this secret out, staying loyal to the prick even when he isn’t here. Zayn can’t even have this one thing, can’t even have this room without the reminder that it doesn’t belong to him.

Nothing belongs to him; not even the notes Harry tucks into the pocket of his coat when he isn’t looking because he knows Zayn will refuse them otherwise, because Harry always wanted to make sure Zayn remembered he was a whore when he got too comfortable.

Nothing belongs to him. Not his money, this room, the clothes on his back that Harry’s money paid for, not the air in his lungs or the vanilla scent in his nose.

Harry doesn’t belong to him. He never has.

This trickle of resentment leaks into his heart at the hope of hearing Harry’s voice at the end of the ring.

  

\+ + + +

 

The first time Zayn ever tried whiskey, it was Macallan. He’d tried spirits, vodka, rum and coke, wine, beer that’s gone too warm sat in rooms at parties, from the age of twelve. But his first glass of whiskey was at St. Andrew’s bar, down somewhere between the south and Trafalgar where Zayn had stumbled, bored and out of his mind on a dodgy spliff he was passed in the last pub that he didn’t question, smoked anyway because he craved any type of high, as the summer pavement warmed his scruffy boots and businesses lingered with too much opportunity and the sun sucked all the energy for fun out of him and left him wandering around like a ghost through the shitty London streets.

It’s Harry’s fault, he thinks, has always said, why he’s got such champagne taste on beer money, how it’s Harry’s fault that Zayn’s first glass of whiskey was Macallan, and nothing cheaper. That his first taste of something was diamonds and nothing less shiny. And it was his own fault to expect rubies afterwards, when the world wanted to force rough stones into his mouth and twist him into thinking they gleamed.

Zayn could have walked away that night, and Harry could have let him, but they didn’t. They just sat there, Zayn far past sober and Harry too proud to leave but too hesitant to make the first move. He watched Zayn anxiously twitch and slowly relax as the evening settled down and more alcohol fizzled away into his bloodstream, and that smirk Harry wore that un-eased him at the beginning of the evening began to make his trousers tight and damp—the smile that tickled his libido and tidied his rationality out of order every time they met after that, in whatever hotel they could find, in the back of Harry’s car, anywhere that would swear the world to secrecy.

“You’ve never been here before, have you?” he asked, eyes bright, rings glinting under the light.

“Is it that obvious?” Zayn grimaced in this tipsy-smiley way that made him chuckle.

“Don’t usually see men in ripped jeans and combat boots in here, mate,” he said. “Usually just Alexander Wang or Tom Ford.”

“Thing is, I get my paycheque on a Friday fortnight,” Zayn said, rocking back and forth on his bar stool, sipping his whiskey. “Not that it matters anyway, not that my job could buy me expensive alcohol that actually tastes like shit. Cheap stuff is the best, Guinness, Jack, hasn’t changed.”

“I don’t mind a pint of Guinness myself, every now and then.” He tapped his finger on the bar, almost in a nervous manner. “If it’s shit, why are you drinking it?”

“Life experience, innit?” he said, and Harry chuckled. “Probably the only time I’ll be able to sit in a bar full of rich wankers and drink whiskey that’s way too expensive to be good. Imagine what my dorm mate is gonna say when I tell him this.”

“Is that all I am, then? A story to tell, some rich guy you can boast about and wave around to your friends?” he teased.

Zayn nodded. “I mean, you aren’t really gonna be anything else, are ya? We just met, why wouldn’t I take advantage of that? Wouldn’t you?”

He pondered for a moment, and Zayn ticked his tongue against the roof of his mouth to see what the whiskey was like in the aftertaste, if it tasted any better once it was gone, like most things do.

“Suppose I would,” he mumbled. “Suppose I’d take full advantage, of everything there was to offer.”

He looks over to Harry, looking amusedly coquettish. “And what d’ya think is on offer, huh?”

Zayn remembers the way Harry brushed his knee against his and moved away almost immediately, as if to propose it was accidental, but Zayn knew better. He’d seen men like Harry before, in the many similar bars he’d been in, to pick up his fair share of wealthy sycophants, who’s pockets he’d slip his slick fingers into and pull out the linings of and leave them flustered and without any cash to order their next drink. He’d seen them convulse and mumble he was better than their wives, caught trying to grab more than what they were willing to pay for, quick grasps between bar stools and kisses in the elevator on the way up.

He’d lied, sure, and maybe it made Harry feel like he was special, being the first one, the first wealthy asshole to walk into that bar and glance at his pretty face and make a claim over him that wouldn’t fade until the morning, but it was just as fun for Zayn, too. To pretend, to act.

He’s not sure when that line began to blur, doesn’t remember when he let himself become so blinded to it, but he felt it hard, in his stomach like he’d been winded, knocked every swirl of air from within him, when he realised.

Writers call it The Point of No Return. Zayn called it fucking up.

There was always such a rush in making people think they had him wrapped around their palms, when he was the one who was sticking his fingers up their arses and watching the bills spill out.

He’d done it since he was a child; manipulate. It started with his mother, winning them over with his doe eyes for another biscuit, another sweet, another pound for the pocket money jar. Once he was old enough, it evolved into flickering fingers across bouncer’s chests at club doors, when he snuck out in the middle of the night with his friends, when he felt that first tingle of arousal all teenagers feel shoot through his bloodstream, to persuade the buff men to let them in. Until his voice began to lower, and his cock grew longer, and he suddenly understood that men would pay to touch it and would pay more for him to touch theirs, and he realised the game had changed. He realised he could buy the clothes he wanted, eat at the restaurants he always wanted to try—the ones with the five stars and the caviar, where even his reflection in the glass of the window provoked a type of disgust as he passed by—and he could buy his family the things they’d always wanted and were never able to afford.

Zayn always said it was a bonus that it felt fucking amazing at the same time.

So, when he found himself in a hotel room, his cock already half-hard in the elevator, and Harry’s protruding from the trousers he whispered he wanted Zayn to filthily rip off him, he wasn’t surprised. It was normal for him, it _is_ normal. Even when he’s not at work, he is, because there’s always a horny bastard lurking around a corner he can be promoted to his knees for—he thinks that’s the beauty of doing what he does: his work is never done.

Harry fucked him so good in that hotel room that night that he questioned if he should be doing what he does at all; if he should just find a man who could pound him into a bed as Harry did and settle down with him for the rest of his life, live on his savings, happily ever after.

But if there was one thing Harry taught him that night, and every other night they met, it’s that happily ever after’s don’t exist, because if they did he’d be at home with his wife and his children instead of tucked away in a hotel room with a whore, fucking him until he’s nothing but fizzles and pops of whatever _the fuck_ Harry wants Zayn to be because there’s no other way to survive if Harry isn’t dominating him, no other way to have those moments unless it was happening Harry’s way. And he was okay with that, as long as they had those few savoured minutes at the end of it all that Zayn always had with everyone, where they’d cuddle and talk and joke, and then pretend it never existed before it got too serious.

That was his problem, Zayn thinks— _knows_. He got too serious.

“How is Lilah?” Zayn asked in the wind-down. His arms were wrapped around Harry’s waist, head on his freshly shaven chest, as he listened to the beat of his heart.

“I told you not to ask me about my children,” he chastised, though his tone held no vindication; it never did, not with Zayn. “But she’s fine. She’s got a violin performance next Friday at 7:00. Don’t know whether I’ll be able to make it next week.”

Zayn looked up, this shallow wave creeping over him. “We don’t meet until 9. Are ya sure you won’t be able to see me?”

“No, Zayn, I just told you that.” He rolled his eyes and lit a cigarette and offered Zayn a drag. “You know how it is.”

“Yeah, I know,” he mumbled, looked away.

He knew how it was, he knew what that meant, of course he did. Harry didn’t let him forget, not in those moments where things were far too vulnerable and risky and neither of them liked it much but neither of them had the gumption to say anything about it either, so they just let it be.

Zayn thinks that’s where Harry fucked up.

Zayn knew how it was, he knew that if his Friday night wasn’t filled with Harry it had to be filled with someone else, because he still had a job to do and his own pockets to fill—Harry knew that, too, and Zayn knew he knew from the way he held him tighter that night, fucked into him a little harder, as if it would have made him remember the feel of Harry for longer whilst they were apart.

It was bullshit, how Harry thought Zayn would forget him just because they weren’t connected by their hips, how he thought that the only satisfaction Zayn got was from Harry’s cock and not his touch or his words or his laugh in the early mornings.

“What about Saturday?” he asked greedily, the idea of not seeing Harry for two weeks frightening him like a crackhead without the promise of his next fix.

But he was shut down quickly, reminded that the weekends were for Harry’s wife and his children, and their little reverie was for the day before, so Harry had something to get him through the sex with his wife when Zayn was absent. And Zayn made sure that Harry remembered him, even when he wasn’t there, pulling his hair or crooning his name. He made sure the digs in his back stung when he lay down in bed beside his wife at night and he held her arms down whilst he fucked her, so she wouldn’t touch him, so she wouldn’t detect the marks of another on her husband’s back, so Zayn had a part of Harry that was completely his own.

“I don’t think I can be away from you for two weeks, think I might go insane,” he’d ushered out into the quiet.

Zayn remembered the way Harry looked at him that night as they lay there, how he flushed his trousers on his legs and mismatched the buttons on his shirt and almost fell down the stairs as he rushed from the room, laces undone and socks inside out. How he’d thrown a wad of fifties, tied by a dirty elastic band, on to the foyer table as the door slammed behind him. And Zayn sat there, realising only after a bottle of Chardonnay that he’d scared Harry away and the phone call had been a ruse to escape.

That was the first night Zayn realised _he_ was the reason Harry fucked up.

  

\+ + + +

 

There’s this knocking on the bathroom door that wakes him up, that seems to intertwine with the pounding in his head as the noise carries on and on.

“Zayn,” he says, sounding so delicate Zayn almost believes it’s anyone _but_ him. “Zayn, baby, open the door.”

“It’s open, you fuckin’ idiot,” he grumbles.

The water is cold around him now, his fingers just swill past dead waves, but it doesn’t stop Harry falling into the bath opposite him, completely clothed and frantic-lipped. The stillness of the water is broken, and Harry reaches out to touch his cheek, and he breaks as his reflection in the bath water, the only thing blinding him from his marred skin, his red eyes, the only thing keeping his composure, disappears.

“God, baby, what have you done?” he asks, and he’s cupping his hands to wash him, wash the crimson away from Zayn’s arms and back down into the water. “What the fuck have you done?”

“I got drunk.”

“And what? Tried to fucking kill yourself? Jesus, Zayn.”

He plucks Zayn’s naked body from the water, like he did from that crowd of men those years ago, those years that seem like so, _so fucking_ _long ago_ , when things were simpler, when life was kinder to him, when the world took his hand and seemed to show him these heartbreaks and lonely nights plastered with daydreams through rose-tinted glasses.

A towel is wrapped around him. He’s shivering, lips trembling, knees shaking, but he can’t answer Harry’s questions. He can’t tell him he’s cold when he’s not, he can’t tell him he’s right when he’s wrong, he can’t explain this shattering and ineffable notion in his chest because there’s no way to, because he knows it doesn’t really belong to him. There’s this parasitical phantom taken refuge in his mind and it’s branded with a name he can’t scratch off, can’t replace or cover, and it digs and digs and clones everything he knows with these seeds that sprout Harry in every way.

Harry, Harry, Harry.

Zayn remembers that time he walked into Acne and found this printed shirt that just screamed Harry’s name; these frilly sleeves and thin, chiffon material that would show the perfect amount of his skin and tattoos, show everyone this glimmer of something they couldn’t have but Zayn knew he would. And when he saw Harry wear it for the first time, the world seemed to spin and change formation, and the green in his eyes looked so beautiful, and he wore that fucking smirk that only Harry could really pull off, lips rhubarb-hued and to die for, and he slid his hands underneath Zayn’s shirt and around his nipples with these cold fingertips that made him tremble and fall to his knees, until his throat was clogged with Harry and he tasted him every time he swallowed for the rest of the night. 

He decided then that red was Harry’s colour. And everything red he’s seen since then has reminded him of Harry, of that night.

And when Harry met him one night in the bar they’d first introduced in and he was wearing the same shirt but in a royal blue with black embroidery, and his hair was down and his lips were tinted this slight red from the gentle smear of YSL Rouge Pur he knew Zayn loved on him, and he was wearing this choker that Zayn slipped his fingers underneath and dragged him down to his thighs later that night, it dawned on him that every colour was Harry’s to own, and he was completely fucked.

Harry rocked his lips that night, fucked into his mouth so good and wouldn’t back down even when Zayn was gagging and making these slick sounds because he couldn’t go any further, and Harry did anyway.

“I’m gonna fucking cum,” he moaned out, the bed creating a rhythm of his own that continued rocking even after they’d stilled. “Oh, baby, baby, I’m gonna cum inside your mouth. You dirty, fucking little slut. You feel, _oh_ , you feel so incredible, yeah, oh fuck, fuck _, fuck, oh.”_

When Harry came, Zayn saw his stars, the sparks that fell from his eyes and out of his open mouth and poured down his skin until the sky was in his palms and on their bed, and that night it was only them in the world who existed. Outside the room, everything was burning, and they were creating the flames.

And it felt so fucking good that Zayn felt it for days after, his lips still cracked at the sides, tongue still burnt, eyes still sore from how much he’d cried at the pleasure and the _yes, yes yes!_ he screamed out whilst the ceiling chipped and Harry met his fortissimo with a low growl of his own.

“Your body, Zayn, fuck,” he murmured, falling on top of him, all sticky and a simmering flame, still. He grabbed Zayn’s cheeks harshly between his thumb and forefinger and pulled him close, looked so deep in his eyes Zayn thought he might drown.  “Your body is mine, it always is. I don’t want you to touch anyone else. This,” he painted the goosebumps over Zayn’s skin with his fingertips, “this is mine, no one else’s.”

“You know that’s not true,” he whispered in return. “I’m everybody’s. I’m not my own, but I’m everybody’s.”

He was Adrian’s, and Jakes, and Kiara’s, and Luke’s, who liked that thing he did with his tongue over and over until he was nothing but a hot spurt of pleasure and a shell of who he was before he walked in. He was Harry’s, yes, but he was Fabian’s not an hour before they met, and Tristan’s before that, and he was Amelia’s, hooked up to the headboard and rocking in the chains and walking out, limp-sided, two mornings after, because she’d paid for the whole weekend, and she’d too advantage of every second.

It’s fun to pretend, and maybe he liked the idea of Harry thinking he was the only one. Maybe that was the fun he found in all this chaos. Maybe that was the power he found in remonstrance of Harry’s prowess, the ace tucked away under the fine silk of his sleeve to challenge Harry’s straight flush.

“I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” Zayn muffles out a few hours later, after Harry dresses him and the ibuprofen soaks into his veins, and the tremors in the glass of water in his hand slowly calm down. “Just wanted to feel summat.”

“Baby, the tops of your arms are covered,” he softly cries. “Don’t tell me you were just trying to ‘feel summat’.”

The roll of bandage and anti-bacterial cream sits beside him in the small first-aid kit, the rest of it is on his arms. They sting, they sting like a bitch, the skin around the wounds red and sore. Harry cut the sleeves off his shirt so the material wouldn’t rub against his arms.

He shrugs. “You didn’t come, I had to feel summat, had to do summat other than drink.”

“And that’s what you’ve been doing in here for two days?”

“Two days?”

“It’s Sunday morning, Zayn. I couldn’t even enjoy my weekend with my family because I’ve been worried sick about you. You nearly drove me fucking mad.” He throws his hands around, exasperated, biting his lip in that way he does when he’s frustrated.

Zayn watches the blood scamper away from the whitened skin in his lip, watches Harry’s wild eyes wander from the ceiling to the floor to him, this look in his eyes that’s malleable by the next words out of Zayn’s mouth.

But he has nothing to say, he has nothing he _can_ say. He hates the fact that seeing Harry makes him feel sick, the fact he’s even thinking that awfully about him stirring his stomach even more, but there’s nothing left for him to bring up. Just empty words and bile and things he doesn’t think he can ever say because it will ruin things forever; past the point of chaos they’ve already found themselves in.

“You could have at least picked up the phone.”

“Didn’t want to talk to you.” He flickers with his thumb and his finger, as if inviting a lighter. God, he needs a fucking cigarette. “Still don’t.”

He sighs. “Zayn, please don’t be like that.”

“Like what?” _"_

 _That.”_ His hands ruffle through his hair, pull so hard that the veins in his forehead run close to the surface of his skin. “What if I hadn’t of come over? What if you’d have just sat in that bath and bled out, and the poor cleaner would have had to come in and find your body pruning away in the water. Why did you do it, Zayn? Don’t give me this bullshit about wanting to feel something, I know how you feel something, and it normally includes more than just a blade.”

The fucking word in his mind as he’s reminded makes his tongue salivate, and he glances up with this insult in his eyes that Harry accepts with a regrettable flicker of his own, His tongue is dry in the silence, bone-dry and desperate to say something in retaliation and not having the energy to do it. The idea of drinking water after sitting so long in it repulses him, but he downs the glass in hopes it’ll ease Harry’s worry.

As ironic as Zayn knows it is, the blade cuts deep, and he knows Harry spent the whole drive here, the whole weekend, sharpening it, and only the tip has broken the surface of his skin.

“You could have died, Zayn,” he says. His weight shifts on the bed beside him, though there’s no touch. Just the purposeful, torturous wave of separation between them. “How, I—what would I have done if you’d died?”

“Moved onto the next whore, I suppose.” He facetiously throws the empty glass on the other side of the room, watches it shatter. But it doesn’t move the room, doesn’t make a single ripple in the roar of mess around them. Harry doesn’t even flinch.

“You think… you still think—” He rises with a scoff and a sigh. Grumbling to himself, incoherent jumbles of sounds Zayn wouldn’t be able to decipher even if he wasn’t still half-drunk and missing blood.

And all he can do is sit there, feel like an imbecile. The truth is he knew this would happen, because like his mother says, his intuition is as wet as the sky, always, and it’s a facet of the curse wrought across his skin that Harry didn’t summon. He knows Harry, and he knows, somewhere deep in the back of his mind that rolls forward in cognisance, that if he went fishing he’d reel Harry in, because Harry is a shark drawn to the swiftest scent of something sweet. And he’s lost enough blood to appeal the whole evening.

Zayn wonders what happened this weekend, whilst Harry was daunting and worrying about him. A sick part of him hopes that he’s miserable, that he argued with his wife and its enough to have Harry here for the rest of he day with him; a part of him hopes Harry didn’t enjoy his daughter’s concert on Friday because he was terrified of what Zayn would do, hopes that Harry’s whole life was corrupted with the wrong thoughts of him, because this is what he deserves. Because he did this, all of this, to both of them.  

“You don’t think I know that?” he shouts, and Zayn isn’t looking at him, but he knows his eyes are brooding and low, and the veins on his neck that pop when he calls Zayn’s name, over and over, are out in full display. “You don’t think I know that all of this is my fucking fault? God, Zayn, you’re so stupid. So, so stupid.”

“Glad you know.”

“But so am I. Fucking hell, I’m even more ridiculous than you. Can you imagine that? Me, being more ridiculous than a pumped up, overpriced, coke-head whore.” He grabs the remaining ornament off the shelf and re-enacts the end of the world on the far room wall. “Me, having gotten so fucking deep into it that I can’t let go. _Me_ , Zayn. A successful businessman, family man, CEO of a fucking enterprise, and I’m here with you, shaking and… _fuck_ , feeling like my heart is going to explode because I wouldn’t know what I would have done if I’d found you in that bath tub without a pulse.”

Harry’s palm is sweaty, and Zayn’s is cold, but they slide together like they’re supposed to, like they always do. At the moment, the floor is his best friend, has been for days, and Harry is the wonton interloper interrupting their conversation as he leans down on bent knees to be close to him. Zayn feels his breath shiver down the opening of his shirt, down his abdomen, and he ludicrously thinks that the smell of Harry’s aura is soaked up by every pore in his skin as it passes by; like a drug, like a little proffer of a hit he’s being teased with and can’t have.

“Fuck you.”

He places a kiss to his forehead, pulls them in closer. They’re both shaking, Zayn can feel it now as his hands glide across the smooth fabric of Harry’s trousers and withdraw again like his fingers have been sliced. The soft tendrils of Harry’s hair are so warm and full of jasmine that when Harry falls into his neck, tickles his cheek, that he falls into the touch. The fatigue and weakness shatters over him and he falls into Harry’s lap, unwilling but also as if he’ll drop away into dust on the floor if he doesn’t.

“Fuck you,” he grits out, his fists weakly hitting circles into Harry’s back. He doesn’t think it’s doing much, but he hits and hits anyway, uses all his last strength in trying to pain him and bruise him, because he can’t share this alone. He has been for days and it’s tore away at everything he owns and everything he thinks.

It’s just shreds. All of it. Just scraps of what was so good, what could have been, what could be if the timeline was different, if they could split and jump from universe to universe, and they fell into some kind of prototype of what Vivian and Edward would have been a few years down the line, if he’d found her snorting coke off a stranger’s dick instead of romanticising the unrealistic throes a life of prostitution carries; the life Zayn thought he was first living when he started out, naïve and full of desire.

Now he thinks he’s just a ball that’s lost its bounce being rolled across the floor, and anyone has the chance to kick him into a different corner.

“You don’t have to hurt me, baby, I already am. I’m already hurt.” His nose brushes against his jaw, and Zayn’s arms fall over Harry’s back. “You’ve already hurt me, so much. I’ve already hurt myself.”

“I’m so tired.”

His rough palms are soft as they slide under his shirt and across his back. “Then, sleep.”

“You’ll be gone when I wake up.”

“I’ll stay.”

Zayn shakes his head and weeps into his shoulder. “You won’t.”

Harry lifts him so they’re lying down on the bed, and Zayn is uses his arm for a pillow as he lies down properly for the first time in days. He pulls Harry’s shirt so close to him, so tightly, that his fingers cramp, but he can’t let go. His lashes feel like needles as they shut and pierce his skin that soaks with tears, and he whimpers into the confines of Harry’s shirt where the buttons pull and gape. Harry strokes his hair and lets Zayn press his cock against the side of his thigh and rub them together until they’re panting and moaning and biting one another until they fall still and sated and wet-crotched and careless, and Zayn cries harder into the quick rise and fall of Harry’s chest in the bitter wind-down of the sweet moment.

“You’re a fuckin’ liar.”

“I know.”

 

\+ + + +

 

His uncle used to say that everything worth touching had to be sold, and every touch you sell is a lie. The thing he always used to remember was that with each touch came a lie, and each lie came a touch. They were synchronous, two parts of a theme that wouldn’t fit without the other to hold it.

There was a bat of his eyes, and the flicker of his fingers over soft crotches that all felt the same after the first hour. The tingle of his tongue upon useless words, and the stretch of this thighs over a grimy bed sheet that soaked up all the sin in time for the next customer. The fiction of two hundred pound an hour and an extra cheap, red curtain hung across the window to make the men feel more special, like it was more of their drama rather than Zayn’s comedy, and Zayn’s deep nails into their skin as he let them pound him against any chipped wall or dirty surface in the room.

It was the saccharine falsity of his smile as they walked out, and his daring fingers wrapped quickly around the wad of cash they threw at him before the door shut him tight inside, alone.

Zayn worked hard to be where he was, touched a lot of people, sold a thousand lies. The countless nights he spent in and out of the hallways of The Penny with men walking in and feeble, fucked out boys crawling out. He knew the ins and outs of the game, knew what men had wives and what men hadn’t been touched in years as soon as they walked through the threshold, like he could detect the fickle chemicals in their blood in his nose and it itched, like he was some sort of fucking moral-less clairvoyant that smelled the opportunity of exploitation and caught it in his grasp for two hundred an hour, a thousand a night.

His mother had taught him a few tricks, as she wove the name father into every man she brought through the door when he was a child. How she’d slip them into the dusk of their living room and drop down on the old leather settee that groaned under their weight. He’d watched countless nights, through the crack in the door and over the creaks in the steps he knew made a sound, the slick of sweat she made form over their skin, how she made them moan, how she toyed with them and found such power in her lack of self-respect that she’d shined a path to Zayn’s future.

Some nights she’d bring home girls, and he’d get bored in the middle and slink back upstairs to watch porn instead.

The night she caught him peeping through the jar in the door, watching like it was the first time he’d ever seen this scene and playing the part so well, she invited him in to watch, and the guy was so drunk he didn’t even realise there was an eight-year old biting his nails at the side, tucked away into a shadow until the birds began to sing outside their cracked windows.

“If everything else fails, you grab every man by the cock and make them your bitch, you make them see their life is worth nothing, baby, nothing. If he’s going to think he can touch you, you make him pay for it. Because that’s all they are, Zayn. Cheap, sleazy filth, just like your father.”

Zayn didn’t wait for everything else to fail. He jumped straight into the deep-end of the pool and somehow floated. He was like the siren at the borders of the rock pools waiting for the skanky sailors to swing by. And he could sing, God, could he sing, and they all fell for it, plummeted straight into the ocean and raised back up only when they had a single breath left to live. On the edge, like how Zayn loved to live, like he lived every breath of every day.

He thinks he swam too deep.

“You’re a fucking idiot,” Jared told him once. “Fuckin’ the same guy like that. You know we don’t do routine, Z. People get too comfortable in routine.”

Zayn picked at his chips and waved his hand through the air. “He’s good, he’s really fuckin’ good, and he pays even better. I don’t see much of a problem.”

“How long have you been seein’ him? You know, on the role.”

“It’s been about…” He pondered, his eyes drifting around as he counted, his thighs clenching shut as he remembered the ways they were peeled open the night before with a practised tongue swimming between his heat. “Five or six weeks, sometimes more than once a week.”

“Fucking _Christ._ ”

“Oh, don’t get all fuckin’ preachy and moral, will you? It’s eight in the mornin’ and that don’t really got anything to do with it, I just don’t want to hear you go on.”

“It’s like, number one rule that we don’t get comfortable, yeah? We take ‘em and we move on, there’s no room for the same guy. Think about all the other rich en’s ya missing out on ‘cause of one guy that probably fucks you too good to actually be gay. He’s probably just got bored of his wife.”

“Guys got money for all the other wankers ‘round here.” Zayn looked out into the sky and back down to his plate, a rush of excitement swooping through him. “I’m seein’ him tonight. Don’t think he’s from ‘round here, think he travels a bit away to get here. Gives me time to prepare.”

“Oh, so he’s not one of those kinky fuckers that likes the smell of another guy on you whilst they’re plasterin’ you to a wall?”

“No, no, he don’t like that.” _At all_. Zayn puffed out this cloud of smoke between them that helped hide his smirk, his unprofessional and dangerous lack of complacency, for a second in time. “It’s good money, Jare, s’all. I’m just doing my job, and I’m makin’ sure I get as much out of it as I can. Y’know, they call us leeches for a reason.”

“Look, as long as he’s payin’ ya good, nothin’ else is much of my business. But don’t tell ya I didn’t tell ya when this goes too far.”

“Jared, money always goes too far. Why d’ya think half the wealthy cunts in the country are lined up for us?”

“You know what I mean. Things go too far in this line of business sometimes. You’re good at your job, really good, don’t get stupid about it, don’t get too greedy. You remember Bailey, yeah? He’s fuckin’ homeless, I hand him sandwiches now on my way between clients. You don’t wanna become a Bailey.”

“I could do with a fuckin’ Bailey’s right now with the way you’re dronin’ on. My mum was quieter than you, and that says summat.”

“Shut the fuck up, Z. I’m just tryna tell you I care for you.”

“I don’t need ya care, Jare, I’m fine. I’m not gonna slip up, and if I do I got plenty of savings I could live on until I find another place to sell my body for an exclusive price of two fifties an hour.” He downed his coffee, stroked the tip of his cock that sat hard underneath the table, even when he was off duty; the viagra still swimming around in his veins. “I know what I’m doin’, been doin’ it longer than you.”

“And yet I already know so much more.”

Zayn shook his head, his voice croaky. “Jare, you really don’t know a thing.”

  

\+ + + +

 

Harry knew too much—that was his problem. It was like an anchor that wouldn’t sway once it touched down. Zayn was drawn to him since then, to try and keep the secrecy theirs, to play into the game Harry excitedly set up and he willingly played.

The game was never useless, never boring or bleak. Not when it was hotel rooms or bathroom stalls at the Ivy over dinner when Harry’s wife was out of town and he’d rented Zayn for the whole week, handed him fifty thousand in a little briefcase Zayn still has stored away under his bed. Not even in the back of taxi’s because Harry liked the idea of being disgustingly normal and working-class and playing out the role of a mundane couple, even when it toed too far to the edge of the line of what Zayn’s job obligated him to do. Not even in Harry’s bed, when they both already fell too deep and didn’t realise it yet, and Harry’s wife came home early and unpacked her things while they continued to fuck in the closet next to her.

Not even when Zayn snuck his way into a suit he rented, and Harry introduced him as a business associate—with a back story they’d all but theorised in those brief moments of wind-down that always went on too long—as he drove to the restaurant he knew Harry and his wife and his sister were having dinner at and squeezed himself into the night. The ladies sat on one side and the men on the other, and Zayn palmed Harry underneath the table between courses until it shook and toppled the bottle of wine on the floor because Harry’s knees knocked against the top in a jolt of sensation as he came.

“Why did you have to fucking do that, huh?” he sneered into Zayn’s ear in the bathroom stall they’d slipped off to, as the women left for the night. “First, you come here, show up whilst I’m having dinner with my wife and my sister, and then you wanna just _undo_ me like that, put me in that position so I can’t even touch you, had to pretend nothing happened. You’re a bad, little fucking slut.”

“Thought you’d like it,” he whined out, as Harry’s hand dug below the waistline of his trousers and cupped his balls, squeezing. “I’m gonna cum.”

“No, you aren’t. I won’t let you.”

He ripped Zayn’s shirt in two, and the buttons clattered on the floor as they fell. He spun Zayn around so fast, bashed his hips against the sink so hard, that he didn’t realise his trousers were around his ankles and his knee was up to the side until Harry pushed into him and filled him completely.

And it was so tight, no lube to soften him up, Harry being merciless enough to only spit once meekly, that it hurt. He bled, and Zayn didn’t work for a week, but it felt so good that he begged Harry not to stop.

He reached around to squeeze the tip of Zayn’s cock in his hand, so tight that the rest of it turned red and the veins pulsed.

“You aren’t gonna cum until I say so. And if you do, I’ll fuck your mouth so hard for so long that you’ll lose all taste but me.” He bit down on Zayn’s neck and drew blood to the surface. “How dare you fucking flaunt yourself in front of my wife like that. And my sister, I saw the way she looked at you, saw the way she flirted with you as if I wasn’t even fucking there, and I just had to watch her do that to you. I know, baby. I’m not an idiot. You’ve fucked her, haven’t you?”

“A few times,” he confessed.

Harry thrust into him hard, and he cried out so loud, and Harry looked at him so maliciously and lust-like, he swore the mirror in front of them cracked.

“Why? Why’d you do that, baby? Huh? Knowing my sister’s hands have been all over you…” He growled. “I’m gonna have to replace her.”

Harry’s hand wound down to his neck and caught it in a hold, yanking him back. He looked on with this glint in his eye that made it clear he was trying to hurt Zayn, that this was his revenge, and Zayn couldn’t help but praise it in moans and whines as they both watched the rebellion be fucked out of him in the reflection of the mirror in front of them.

“And I’m going to do it right here, right now. And if anyone walks through that fucking door, I’m gonna invite them to shove their cock down your throat.”

“You know I, _oh, oh_ , you know I hate that, you know I hate that,” he grunted out in a tight voice. “No one touches me when I’m with you, no one, there’s no one else when I’m with you, that’s my one fuckin’ rule, Harry.”

“Then you best bet no one walks through that door, otherwise it’s going to be broken, isn’t it, baby?”

He paused the conflict of the moment to suckle down on Zayn’s cheek, to turn his head and kiss him so delicately that Zayn forgot what had happened, thought maybe Harry would turn him around and sit him on the counter and fuck into him softly as he finished, that this was the end of his anger and they’d go back to being more than client and escort for one more brief moment of luxury again. But Harry’s hand swiped down across his cheek, and his fingers dove into the back of Zayn’s throat as his mouth opened wide in shock, and he sucked and sucked like he was told until Harry’s fingers pruned.

His leg pushed up onto the counter, so his thighs were parted wide, Harry’s hand forcing his head down beside the surface of the sink, and Harry pounded into him harder than he’d ever done, carried on and on until Zayn was spent and the mirror and the taps and the black marble surface was covered in streaks of Zayn’s hot, white, sticky submission.

Zayn didn’t know how long they were in that bathroom. It could have been hours for all he was aware, but he learnt his lesson. Harry finally turned him around when he was half-conscious and teary-eyed and still hard as he lay on the sink counter. He made sure his arse was as far forward as it could go, his legs over the expanse of Harry’s sinewy shoulders, and he sat up so he could kiss the wetness of Harry’s mouth that caressed him gently for the last round.

And he fucked him slow, in a kind way that made Zayn’s head spin because it was such a contrast to the governing version of Harry that stood behind him minutes ago, whispering into his ear and tucking away the soaked tendrils of his hair and kissing every inch of his face. His hands romanced across Zayn’s skin, his nipples as he pinched, the bruises he left from hasty grasps and cruel intentions. When Zayn moaned out in a cracked voice, Harry grasped it with his tongue and smirked as he swallowed.

“See how much better it is when you’re a good boy, baby,” Harry croaked out.

“Fuck you.”

“I just did,” he groaned. “Don’t tempt me again.”

“You’re still fuckin’ me, you asshole.”

“No, baby, I’m making love to you.”

Harry has this theory about making love. The term originated from the idea that sexual intercourse leads to a baby, and a baby is born in a family of love, and so the love was made. It’s not something that’s exclusive to two people who are in love because it’s just a moment; one moment of love that can be as dead as it was alive the next moment along. And that baby of love will turn into nothing but a reminder of something failed.

And Zayn, well, he agreed, because he was the failed love child Harry was talking about, and everything he’d said had hit the nail on the head without realising it. He agreed because agreeing was easier than disagreeing, because at that point disagreeing would imply he already loved Harry with all his heart and soul, and it wasn’t a truth he ever wanted to face. It wasn’t a truth he ever wanted to say aloud, to speak out into the world and make it a part of history he can’t change, a moment that can only be looked back on with a grimace and a crack of the aces and the looming face of Jared, telling him he was right.

He doesn’t know whether Harry knew back then, either, whether he felt how abnormal it was for an escort’s heart, who had been trained for the entirety of his life to remain complacent in a situation of fire and sex, to beat so out of tune with normalcy. Maybe he did, maybe that’s why he ran away but always came crawling back: the knowing and the destruction; the effect of the drug and the craving for more. Zayn knew all too well, and didn't blame him for running. But he always blamed him for coming back, always—things could have been so much easier if he'd stayed away. 

When he wakes up, Harry isn’t gone like the world promised. His heat radiates to Zayn’s shivering body as he curls in closer, rests his head across his chest, and sighs.

“I love you, Harry,” he whispers. “I love you so much it makes me feel sick to think I’ve given so much of myself to you.” He sweeps his fingertips over Harry’s cheek, and he stirs but doesn’t wake. “And you don’t even want it.”

“Zayn,” he says in his sleep, curls in closer to him, buries his nose in Zayn’s hair, and sighs.

He squeezes his eyes shut and drops his hand down to Harry’s chest. “You’ve gotta have a clue, you’ve _got to_. You ain’t stupid, baby, I know you aren’t, you’ve told me a thousand times.”

Harry pulls him closer and rolls them over, so Zayn is underneath him, protected from the world, from the outside reality tapping on the window and reminding him that this isn’t real.

There’s a knock on the hotel door and a call of a name after, but Zayn ignores the room service. He knows if that door opens and the light shines in, it’ll be a matter of time before the pressure of the outside life pops this bloody and marred bubble they’ve created, and he’s not ready to face it yet. He’ll be ready when Harry is ready, whether that’s in an hour or a month or a year, he’ll walk when Harry walks—it’s been that way ever since the met, and Zayn doesn’t think it’s going to change until Harry leaves him for good. 

There’s Harry, or there’s nothing.

_There’s Harry, or there’s nothing._

“I love you so much.”

 

\+ + + +

 

Tuesday’s didn’t mean much unless he was drunk or high or fucking some random bloke for a bonus on his next shift. It was usually Frasier or Dean, or some other regular he’d see on the days he’d go back into The Penny to check his schedule.

Tuesdays didn’t mean much until September 22nd, 2015, when Harry walked through the door of The Penny and hurried him away. Jared gave him this disapproving look he didn’t have time to discern because Harry was shuffling him on to a private jet with a pre-packed suitcase of new designer clothes that were all Zayn’s perfect size. And Zayn didn’t have time to ask him much about where they were going because they were too busy being miles high.

They landed in Moscow at two in the morning, and Harry said nothing as to why they were in Russia when Zayn asked, apart from how, according to him, the Beef Stroganoff was to die for. Zayn only got an answer when he dropped beneath the table and ate Harry for breakfast instead of his kasha. It’s the most beautiful this time of the year, Harry had said, he wanted to show Zayn the stars and the season and the culture; he wanted to be Zayn’s true first holiday, to have this time from him away from it all, where they weren’t rushed or hasty or trying to hide from anyone.

It was just them, and the best Beef Stroganoff Zayn had ever tasted.

“Harry,” Zayn whispered through the cold, his words becoming this puff of air between them.

Harry wrapped the blanket further around Zayn and moved closer to him, kissing his forehead like he did because they were always the perfect height when they lay down next to one another.

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“Why are we here?”

There was this dull silence that seemed to buzz in Zayn’s ears as he waited, shaking in the autumn cold. 

Zayn was always more of a summer guy. Those days where he wore crop tops and vests or formal shirts he wore in the most informal way, skinny jeans cut into shorts, and he could flaunt what he had to the pretty men sat in bars, sipping Vermont martini’s and apple Jack’s—they were the best days, and business always boomed (like, as in, two grand a night, booming; drunken giggles and forgotten highs, booming). Jared always said the sun was a natural aphrodisiac, something about the way sweat glistened on the skin and everyone smiled had people going crazy for a taste. And Zayn couldn’t help but think he was right when Jared climbed onto his lap and licked the perspiration from his neck and they fucked there, on that open roof-top, for anyone to see.

But Zayn thought he felt most at home there, in the -20 degrees, wrapped in fur line coats and even thicker blankets under the stars, in Harry’s embrace. To have a reason to just hold him and be held and not have to let go.

“I thought it would be nice for us to get away, just me and you. I told you that.”

“Yeah, you told me that. Never said I believed it.” He looked up to Harry as he chuckled, as his face rose and fell like he was falling. “Why are we really here, Harry?”

Harry rubbed Zayn’s arm, skimming his hand up Zayn’s back and into his hair. He swallowed, carefully keeping his eyes up to the sky so Zayn wouldn’t see him.

“Had a fight with Sura,” he said, “just wanted to get away for a while, with you.”

“I thought the idea of havin’ a wife who’s a model is that she’s always away on business, touring and that shit.”

Harry chuckled, pulled him in impossibly closer, and kissed his cold nose. “I wanted to be somewhere where it was just us. My wife may be away, but she still messages me, still rings me. There’s no Sura, no kids, no business, nothing. I turned my sim off before we got on the plane.”

“So, it’s just us?”

“Just us, baby.” He leaned down to nibble at Zayn’s cheek, make him giggle and flush and squirm. “And I booked out the whole hotel for the week, as you can see, so you can scream as loud as you want.”

“I don’t know, I have a very loud voice,” he lilted out playfully.

“We’ll have to put it to good use.”

The whole building was theirs, and Harry fucked him in every bed in every room and listened to Zayn drone on afterwards about how it was such a waste of clean linen but smiling in that awfully endearing way Zayn loves because they both knew he enjoyed it. Best holiday of his life, like one of those dream destination romances you only see in fiction and are never able to touch but try to anyway, through the television screen that fuzzes a _fuck you_ in code of _keep dreaming._

“What was the argument about?”

“Nothing of good use, accused me of cheating.” He shrugged, and his lighter illuminated the night as he lit a cigarette. “Same old shit.”

“Same old shit.” Zayn sat up to look at him, smirking. “Right old shit, then, huh?”

“Zayn, she’s known for years of this type of stuff. She doesn’t actually care about me sleeping around or fucking half the city, if she did she’d do something about it or prove that she cared. She just likes to shove it in my face every now and then to make herself feel better about shagging hot models when she’s on tour. She’s deflecting.”

“Alright, Mr. Freud,” he grumbled and lay back down. “You don’t fuck half the city, do you?”

“Not half the city, no.”

He picked at his reddened and sore cuticles. “But I’m not the only one.”

“Am I _your_ only one?”

“S’different, H. My job makes me fuck other people, you just do it ‘cause you want to.”

“How many times do I have to tell you that you don’t have to do that anymore, Zayn? I’d pay you far more than what you’d earn a week if you let me.”

“I enjoy my job.”

“Don’t lie, Zayn.”

“I do. Harry, I do—”

“Zayn, _don’t lie to me._ ”

Zayn bit his lip and looked away, back out into the sky, because the constellations and the lights were easier to fathom than Harry was.

“And what am I supposed to pay you, huh? Just to be mine.”

“There’s nothing you could pay me. I’m not a whore or a fancy ring, I don’t have a price tag.”

Zayn looked up to him and sat up to separate them with a scoff when the realisation pooled into Harry’s eyes, and he reached out for him.

“Here I thought you saw me more than that this whole time,” Zayn said, shaking his head, back turned away. He wrapped his arms around his knees as he pulled them up to his chest. “If I’m just a whore with a price, why are we on holiday, Harry? Why are we here? Did ya feel sorry for me, ya think you could make me feel special for once, like I can’t do that on me own? I can, Harry, alright? I’m not here ‘cause I need to be, I’m not here ‘cause I have nowhere else to go or I need your money. I stopped needing that a while back. I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone.”

“I know that, baby. We’re not here because I feel sorry for you, it’s not that. It’s just… What I said came out wrong. I didn’t mean to offend you, Zayn, but…”

“But what, Harry?”

“But it’s the truth. You’re an escort, Zayn, I pay for you to be here, that hasn’t changed.”

“Alright, hold on, hold on. So, you want me to stop doing my job for you, ‘cause you think it’s appropriate for me to stop working just ‘cause you want me to, but you think it’s unreasonable for me to want _you_ to not touch any one else, any other whores you wanna pick up wherever?” Zayn swatted Harry away as he reached out again. “You’re a piece of fuckin’ work, Harry.”

“I have a wife, Zayn, do you expect me to stop laying with her?”

Zayn didn’t comment on how he only said he wanted Harry to stop sleeping with other people like him and said nothing about how Harry seemed to jumble his wife into the familiarity of a group of whores, how he spoke more than he actually said without hinting at anything at all, kept the chuckles inside his chest and the snide, jealous comments of how he thought Harry was right.

“Don’t worry, I won’t try and sabotage your conjugal rights.” He rolled his eyes.

“Zayn, you’re being ridiculous here,” he said, curled his arms around Zayn’s chest and pulled him back between his open legs. “Do you think I bring any random people to a six-star romantic getaway in Russia? Do you think I run away from my family with the first man I set my eyes on?”

“I don’t know,” he grumbled facetiously, tongue to the top of his mouth, “do you?”

“No, Zayn, I don’t. You know I don’t,” his tone was censured, and Zayn knew he was scowling without having to look over his shoulder and see the shake of the earth in Harry’s brows behind him. “This is just for you. You’re my little slut, you know that.”

“You’re so incredible at complimentin’ me, aren’t ya? A real charmer.”

“Isn’t that why you slept with me that night in St. Andrew’s?”

“I slept with ya ‘cause you looked like you had a lot of money, and I was right.”

“Oh, baby, don’t be like that. I know that’s not the only reason you stayed.”

“Yeah, I stayed ‘cause you fuck me good and suck me even better, and I love the way you moan my name. Makes my chest tingle, and all that shit.”

“Well, I can’t deny that one.” He smirked against Zayn’s cheek and kissed his skin until Zayn was trying to hide his smile instead of his tears. “I stayed around for more than that, though.”

Zayn cocked his head. “Yeah?”

“Of course I did.” He nodded, his curls that are far too long, that Zayn reminded him about every day of their trip to cut but wouldn’t admit he loved the way it brushed across his thighs as Harry delved down between there in the middle of the night, tickled his cheek. “You help me forget my stress, my worries. A busy CEO has plenty of those, trust me, but you help me forget all of them just by putting my cock in your mouth. And when you do that thing with my balls…” he groaned, and it reverberated straight down to Zayn’s crotch. “You have a way with my balls, did you know that?”

“Glad that’s my specialty.”

He nibbled on Zayn’s ear. “I bet I could make you cum like this, just doing this to you. We could do with a warming up.”

“I’ll let you have me, if you promise me one thing.”

“What’s that, baby?”

Zayn turned around and draped his long coat across Harry’s legs as he sat down in his lap, his arms around Harry’s shoulders, noses brushing, lips foreboding a kiss that would shake the ground, change everything, make the snow turn direction and bounce around them like they’re concealed in a little ball of their own world.

“Don’t touch anyone else,” he begged, and when Harry looked away, Zayn turned his gasp of uncertainty into excitement as he pressed their crotches together in a swipe of his hips. “Please. I’ve given up more for you than you realise, and it’s not fuckin’ fair, Harry. You still have a wife and a family, and a good fuckin’ career, and me on the side, and I live with that. I just want it to be you and me, yeah? Just you and me.”

“You know it’s not that easy.”

“Then, make it that easy, I know you can. You just don’t want to.”

Harry looked away, but Zayn pulled him back between his gloved palms, eyes glossy and lips wet and waiting to be touched.

“Do it because you care for me, yeah?”

A pause. Zayn held his breath whilst he waited far too long.

“Yeah. Okay, yes,” he mumbled, and took Zayn’s lips in his, pulled him down by his hair and flipped them around, so Zayn was underneath them and Russia was above. “Russia is ours, baby. Only ours.”

There was something about the stars that night that told Zayn it was too good to be true. Harry was right— Russia was theirs. But there was a whole world for them outside of their fantasy land, waiting with knives and harsh spirit and societal condemnation. It wasn’t until they got back home, and Zayn skulked back off into the shadows, and Harry back into the limelight of his high-calibre world, that he realised Harry had tricked him: Russia was theirs, always, but it was the only thing that would ever be, and all the rules they made up as kings in that snowy wonderland didn’t exist past the walls of their palace.

He didn’t realise he’d been tricked so cruelly until he visited Harry the night they got back and found Jared in his arms, underneath his body that was _only Zayn’s,_ filled with his cock that only Zayn knew how to please. His chest burst with this molten rock that cooled and formed something new inside him he could never change.

Zayn thinks it all went downhill from there.

“You fucked my sister, what else was I supposed to do?” Harry asks calmly as he curls his fingers around Zayn’s hair.

“How about, not fuck someone else when you told me you weren’t gonna anymore,” he bites. When Harry hums and grinds his teeth in that way that makes Zayn mad, because he knows the telltale signs of what Harry does before he acts like a cock or wants to start an argument, because in four years he’s come to know him that well, more than he should. He raises his hand. “No, no, no. Don’t, Harry. And to argue what ya gonna say, maybe don’t try to find loopholes in everythin’ _I_ say, so you can find a way to still be a cunt and get away with it.”

“They are some harsh words, darling. But, I suppose, they’re right. A whor—someone like you doesn’t have many rules and I do have this urge to break the two you do have, just to be an arsehole.”

“M’not a whore, Harry,” he mumbles, twirling his fingers over the lines of his favourite tattoos, watching the goosebumps skim across Harry’s skin. “I’m an escort, although barely, anymore.”

“Escort is just another fancy word for whore that rich people like me can say instead, so we don’t lose our vanity.”

“It’s not the same.”

“It is, Zayn.”

“No, it’s not,” he snaps and looks up to Harry, brows lowering, teeth biting down, and Harry looks taken aback, that wideness in his eyes that tells Zayn he knows he’s wrong, but his pride won’t ever let him admit it, “I’ve been a whore and I’ve been an escort, they’re different. Trust me.”

His skin turns cold as he leaves the bed for the balcony, lighting a cigarette as he goes and taking the box with him because he knows Harry will take the first one, like he always does; likes the taste of him on his cigarette, or something else fucking stupid he’s accepted about Harry.

“After trashing the hotel room, I don’t think you have to worry about standing out here to smoke.” He wraps his arms around Zayn’s hips and pulls them both back on to the lounger. “It’s fucking freezing.”

“Did it to get away from you, but you followed me.”

He takes the cigarette as Zayn is mid-puff. “Makes a change, I’m usually the one who can’t lose you. Like my shadow, or something.”

Zayn makes this sound between a choke of air and a scoff because he doesn’t have energy for the real thing. “Thought you’d already lost me.”

“I may have told you that, but I knew you were right here. I couldn’t stay away.”

“Right, well, you can leave.”

“Hardly.” He huffs. “You’re a mess, baby.”

Zayn throws his hands into the air, exasperated. “I don’t even know why you’re fuckin’ here.”

“Because—”

“Don’t, don’t give me that bullshit, Harry.” He waves him off, annoyed. “There’ve been plenty of times I needed you, times where I thought I wouldn’t survive without you, and you were _nowhere to be seen._ You’re like a fuckin’ magician, with a secret trick, fuckin’ up innocent people’s minds, I’ll give you that.”

“But you did survive without me, yeah? You were strong enough, you survived before me.”

“And what? I’ll survive after you, is that what ya gonna say? ‘Cause if it is I’ll just save the niceties and smack you one right now.”

“That’s not what I was going to say, no.” He chuckles, brushes his head across Zayn’s shoulders, the side of his face. “I was just going to say you don’t give yourself enough credit. Don’t put it on me that you’re this strong.” 

“I’m not strong, Harry,” his voice cracks and he shakes his head, and suddenly Harry’s fingers are too hot on his skin as he moves them tighter in comfort, and he’s standing on the other side of the balcony. “If anything, you’ve made me stronger. All the times you want to break my heart made me stronger, but I feel so fuckin’ weak.”

There’s silence, Harry lets him have his moment—one of the good things about Harry is that he’s intuitive, too, and these golden times seem to shine like a torch is being flashed on them, so rare and endearing, and the world stands still as they wait for it to pass, like it’ll be gone if they move too quick. Zayn truly sees Harry in these moments, sees the shimmer of a profligate bravado be chased away by something more meaningful and benevolent; a kinder soul, a deeper smile. He accepts them wearily, because by now, after four years, he’s seen enough of all sides of Harry for the real him to become a riddle, and he’s never been good at those.

“You called me a cokehead,” he whispers, strained, on the verge of spilling the tears he’s trying so hard to blink back. His hands on the railing are tight, and he feels the skin around his wounds peel open wide as his muscles tense in their hold. “You called me a cokehead.”

“I—” he stutters and falls into a sigh. “I know.”

“After everything, you called me a cokehead,” his voice raises, hand in his hair and pulling. He lights another cigarette and watches it die between his lips through frantic puffs. “You were there, Harry. You watched me withdraw, you watched me suffer for days, beg you for a fuckin’ hit, crawling on my knees, pissing myself because my body didn’t know what to do without it.”

There’s a sobering twitch in Harry’s face, the stillness of his body as he listens to the rant, like a child getting beaten for grabbing its sticky fingers into the sweet drawer, like this is his jury and he’s about to be executed. Maybe it’s Zayn’s voice—he always loses his accent when he’s angry, sounds more like Harry, all proper-spoken and ridiculous like he’d mock Harry for regularly. Zayn snidely thinks that maybe Harry finally sees them as equals, and not like a penthouse to his one-bedroom.

“That was my lowest point, lowest point of my life, and you were there, Harry. You stayed with me, the whole time, the whole week, and I really appreciate that, I do. You were the one who pushed me to get off the stuff. But now, you’re gonna throw it in my face like that because you’re mad.”

“Because I was scared,” he corrects. “I saw you in that bath earlier and the bloody water…” He judders and stands to his feet. “Zayn, I was terrified. I was shaking more than you were. And you just looked… so _out of it,_ I thought you—I thought you’d done something, alright? I thought you’d done it again. I looked around for it, I wiped my fingers over the fucking toilet and the sink and the table to see if there was anything there.”

“And what did you find?”

“I didn’t find anything, of course I didn’t.”

“Exactly, you didn’t find nothing.” He shakes his head. “Don’t think that I don’t want to. Every-fucking-day, I want to, but I don’t."  

“I know, baby.” He strokes Zayn’s cheek, but he moves away. “I’m sorry. I don’t think I’ve ever said that to you, but I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“No, you haven’t, ever, in four years.”

“I’m sorry, Zayn.”

“Do you even know what exactly you’re sorry for?” Zayn hums, clicking his tongue, hard and wet eyes staring on into the cockney distance.

“No, I don’t. I think there’s so much to be sorry for at this point, I don’t know where to begin,” he admits. “Guess, I’ll start here, now, with you.”

“You think that’s gonna be enough?” His voice is quiet again, asking not like he’s accusing Harry but begging him for reassurance, begging to tell him an answer because he _doesn’t know_ if it’s enough.

He hopes Harry will say no because he knows if he says yes he’ll accept it anyway, because what else can he do? What else can he go by than what Harry says when it’s all he’s ever done?

Harry lifts his chin up with the hook of his finger, and presses a gentle kiss to his lips, to his cheeks, his nose, his forehead, everywhere he can touch his lips to Zayn’s skin. And Zayn rolls his head back and revels in the warmth, because it’s the middle of winter and the balcony is cold and his cheeks are drying wet, and he knows none of this would matter anyway because he’d still let Harry kiss him and touch him and hold him even if it was scorching in the middle of summer and it was too sweaty to even graze their skin against one another without being too hot.

“I know it won’t be enough, but every goal has a starting point, and mine’s right here on this balcony.”

He’s sobbing before he realises it, wrapping his arms around Harry’s skin before he has a chance to tell himself otherwise. “Why are you here, Harry? Just leave if you’re gonna hurt me, okay? Just go, I’ll get over it.”

“I’m not going to leave you,” he says, and Zayn can’t help but be tricked in the promise of his words, like the fool he is.

“You have a whole life out there, H, not just me in this room, not just us. A whole life.”

He wraps his arms around Harry’s shoulders and falls into his chest, these hiccups forming in his throat as he cries. And Harry holds him, without question—he was always good at that, being silent: Zayn remembers Harry saying once that he thinks silence is better than something he’ll regret later on, a name or an insult or an idea he speaks that doesn’t fall in line with what his brain wants him to say, as he puts it, because things are easier to reconcile when there’s nothing instead of something.

When Zayn’s knees feel weak and they buckle, Harry lifts him back into the room and onto the bed, pulling the duvet off the floor and over them both, and sings to him as his sobs quieten down into sniffles. He kisses Zayn’s skin, his hair, his forehead, his cheeks, anywhere his lips can touch Zayn’s skin, and Zayn lets him, because it’s the middle of winter and he’s cold.

And when the world starts to dull and the sky leaks with patters that fall on the window panes, and it feels like once again they’re the only ones left, Harry leans down to his ear, kisses it softly, and whispers to him in generous redress.

“She left me.”

 

\+ + + +

 

Harry didn’t tell Zayn he was married at first.

He’d had his suspicions, of course, the little band around his finger where his ring had covered his skin from the sun, or how he touched Zayn at first as if he was a woman: fragile and flat-chested and reaching his hand down between his thighs as if he forgot, for a moment, that it was a cock instead of a pussy.

He’d shrugged it off, supposed Harry was recently divorced, the idea that he’s only ever been with a woman deterred by the many university stories Harry told him, of rim jobs and dry handies on squeaky dorm room beds or bathroom stalls far too dirty ever to touch but he did anyway because he was a desperate, adolescent, hormonal, experimental slut.

It wasn’t unusual for clients to take their wedding rings off when they were with him, made the idea of their swift dalliance even more believable when they looked down and weren’t reminded of their doting partners who didn’t deserve this.

Zayn was used to it, the way people treated him, how they liked to lie to him, and it was amusing for him to see so easily past the fiction—he was good at it, too; the stereotypes and the cliché’s that walked through the door, like leaves bustling through with the wind.

But Harry slipped past him.

By the time Zayn caught Harry forgetting to take his wedding ring off, the hook had already caught too deep into the water, and there was no going back from it. He found himself clinging on to Harry so he wouldn’t drown, and Harry held him securely, despite Zayn feeling like he wanted to let go.

When Zayn pissed him off, Harry would leave the ring on whilst he fucked him, to tease him, remind him like he loved doing so much that he wasn’t anything other than a boy he met in a bar that he’s been hounding for too long on the side.

Zayn thinks, sometimes, Harry wears it to remind himself more than anyone. 

“She’s just some girl I married and knocked up. Twice,” he said to Zayn one warm night in August, shrugging and tickling Zayn’s forearm with the brush of his fingers, as if it was normal.

“A _woman_ you love,” he mumbled in return.

Zayn felt his soft curls against his skin as Harry shook his head. “No, a woman I used to love. If I loved her, truly, I wouldn’t be here, with you. I’m just… with her, don’t really see the need in a divorce. And it would just make the situation with the children difficult, you know, with having separated parents, and custody battles, and with me being at work so much and with her travelling, it would just be… a mess. It’s not worth it.”

Zayn looked up, skimming his hands up Harry’s chest and back down to his half-hard cock that he gave a cheeky pump, and Harry smirked down at him between teeth-trodden lips.

“But you aren’t happy, H.”

“I told you, it doesn’t matter.”

“‘Course it matters, your happiness is important.”

“But my children’s happiness is more important than mine.” He sighed and moved from underneath Zayn, so their bodies disconnected, and Zayn felt the shift between them. “My children will always come first, Zayn. I love them with all my heart.”

“I never expected anything else,” he said softly, stroked his cheek, and Harry looked to him and soaked up the smile, the emotion, he was offering, despite the numbness Zayn felt in his veins. “In fact, if you thought ought else, I probably woulda kicked the shit out of ya. Wouldn’t want another kid to go without a dad like I did, y’know?”

Harry returned his smile, and it sobered Zayn, made the remaining endorphins of their sex and their laughs soak up all the coke in his veins until there was nothing but a pure moment between them. “Yeah.”

“I get the situation. I mean, like, I don’t, but I do, if that even makes sense.” He rolled his eyes at himself, and Harry chuckled. “Obviously, if you left ya wife, your kids probably wouldn’t become coke addicts ‘cause they start to sell their body and don’t know what to do with the money, if you got a divorce,” he sardonically joked, waved it off when Harry frowned. “But, I understand. It’s more than that. I don’t blame ya for wanting to make them believe their parents are happy. I sort of wish someone was there to do that for me.”

“It’s not pretend, Zayn, it’s…” he battled with his tongue, huffed when he couldn’t get the words out, and stood to his feet with a hand through his hair. “I don’t know what it is.”

“If you don’t love your wife but you’re with her to make your kids happy, I’d say that was pretendin’.” He shrugged and leaned over to pop one of the complimentary strawberries on the bedside table into his mouth. 

“It’s not pretending, _fuck_ _sake_ ,” he bit, sitting down in the chair in the corner. “It’s not understanding how you feel and being terrified of fucking it up, for your children and for yourself and your partner. It’s doing shit like this with you because it’s the only way you can escape and try and put it into perspective.”

Zayn hummed. “And how’s that working for ya? Is my cock puttin’ it in enough perspective? I’ll let you put it in your mouth for free, one-time offer.”

“I don’t know whether I love her.” He looked up to Zayn, and Zayn paused between chews and breaths as his chest crammed momentarily, and the air between them became too constricted. He sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know if this is just a rough patch.”

“Wouldn’t consider a three-year affair with me a rough patch, more of a puddle of mud you sink further into every time you fuck me.”

“All married couples have them. This could be really normal, a sort of catharsis, yeah? ‘Cause she’s doing it, too. Maybe we’re being separated just to get closer again, like an elastic band. I think I’ve heard that somewhere before.”

“Yeah, in Angus Thongs and Perfect Snoggin’, you absolute idiot.”

“Would make sense,” he grumbled, “Lilah loves that stupid fucking film.”

“I think you’re tryin’ to get yourself to think summat you can’t, like, trying to trick your brain into thinkin’ this is the universe’s way of makin’ sense of things, me and you in this room, havin’ this conversation,” Zayn said, seriocomically. “I mean, listen to ya self, you’re tryin’ to justify fuckin’ me behind your wife’s back for years ‘cause you think it’s meant to be.”

“I love my children so much, so fucking much. Maybe I just think I’m still in love with her because I see her in my children. Like, I see her in Lilah’s eyes or Christian’s smile.”

“Definitely not, Christian has your smile.”

“Or in the way they say things sometimes, reminds me of when me and Ana were in love, when we were younger, or, like, in Christian’s abilities, or Lilah’s way of making me smile, always. Maybe I put all my love into my children and there’s none left for everyone else, or maybe the love for my wife is still in here.” Harry pointed to his chest and looked up with these hopeful eyes that made Zayn’s stomach turn over. “Or maybe it’s—”

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Harry, I ain’t ya fuckin’ therapist,” he snapped, irate, shoulders tense. He slammed the bowl of strawberries back onto the side, scoffing. “I ain’t a fuckin’ trained psychologist, alright?”

“I never said you were,” Harry retaliated, mumbling, brows knitted in defence. “I was just talking.”

“And do ya think I want to sit here and talk to ya about your family, and how you might still be in love with ya fuckin’ wife, when you just fucked me in this bed for so long my thighs are on fuckin’ fire? Do you really think that? When we’ve been doin’ this shit for years, havin’ this same deluded conversation?”

He repeated, grit jaw, through tight lips, “I was just talking.”

“People have this idea that escorts are just some fuckin’ mindless people who sell themselves for the fun of it.” He waved his arms about in the air, turning his back to Harry, and though he heard the creak of the chair and felt the dip in the bed, he kept his back to him. “I am a person, I do feel things, Harry, especially for people I’ve been seein’ and fuckin’ and hearin’ little bits about their life for the past two years. You don’t pay me to listen to you talk about your family, you pay me to do what I’m good at, and sometimes you don’t even pay me at all, and I don’t want you to, ‘cause it’s so much more than a few fifty notes.” 

“No, Zayn, I didn’t—”

“‘Cause when you sit down with someone and talk about your family, and your job, and your childhood, and your cliché, preppy fuckin’ universities days at Oxford, there’s these little things called emotions and they grow. I don’t know whether you know they exist, or if they’re just exclusive to people who _aren’t_ arrogant tossers, who actually think about how other people fuckin’ feel.”

Harry’s hand pushed down onto Zayn’s arm, to test the waters, and when he knew it was clear, he wrapped his arms around Zayn’s waist and pulled him back on to the bed and into his lap. “I think you’re being a bit ridiculous,” he said softly. “But you’re right, I’m sorry. You’re being completely unprofessional and I’m acting way too cock-ish, but I think we’ve been doing that for a while now, baby, haven’t we?”

“You know we have,” he grumbled, and begrudgingly folded his arms over Harry’s. “I told ya, it’s so much more than that.”

“I know.” He kisses Zayn’s hair. “I think that’s what scares me sometimes, I like to run away. It’s a bad habit.”

“You didn’t have to tell me that one to believe it.” He sighed. “My feelings ain’t something I sold ya, Harry, you just took ‘em. It’s not my choice,” he mumbled, fingers at his skin to enforce the nervous habit he knew Harry disliked.

Harry brought Zayn’s eyes up from the sheets to his own, sealed their lips in a kiss, and smiled down at him—in this way that almost assured Zayn he felt something, too, something other than lust or attraction or arousal, something purer and lighter, something he could believe in, but it’s gone faster than a light losing its power.

“I don’t want to lose this,” he said, nibbling at Zayn’s earlobe. “I like this, makes me forget about my wife, my troubles.”

“Doesn’t sound like it.”

“Most of the time. Sometimes, you just make me remember more. You’re so good, you make me feel guilty, just for being a hundred times better than my wife at sucking my cock or letting me hook you up to the bed frame.”

Zayn smirked, and wound his arm around Harry’s neck to find a grasp in his hair. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he whispered hotly. “She never even got past the rustling of the handcuffs, she’d been running from the room.”

“Sounds… _riveting_.”

“It’s not like with you.” He pulled them around, turned them over, so Zayn was underneath, and Harry was staring down at him in that way that made his cheeks heat up with desire. “It’s another world here, baby, just us. You can feel whatever the fuck you want, but it doesn’t exist outside of this room. I could love you right now, and it wouldn’t matter as soon as I left, because that’s what I pay you for, yeah?”

Zayn felt this sinking in his chest, like sand falling into a hole too wide for the ground to cover, for his face to hide as it sags into a frown, until his saddened lips curl at the sides, and Harry kisses it away. He felt this puncture in his chest at the lie Harry tried to spin, because he knew he would have to go along, because he had no other choice, because Harry was right—he was being paid to do whatever the fuck he was told. And sometimes he didn’t, sometimes he misbehaved, and he liked being punished for it, but those consequences were daunting, and he had no energy to try and face them.

So, he stayed silent, and Harry frowned, look down at him like he was a lost and injured animal, and cooed into his ears as Zayn’s throat closed up.

“It’s okay, baby. It’s okay to pretend.”

“What if it isn’t pretendin’ anymore, Harry?” he whispered, so quiet that the static of the television and the breeze drifting in through the window almost swallowed it.

Harry pulled away, stopped the hand moving down between his exposed thighs, and shifted so he was down on his elbows, licking Zayn’s lips and making him want more but not kissing him. He brushed the side of Zayn’s hair, tickled his cheek, his jaw, and their eyes met, and they fell into this chasm where the world didn’t exist and it was just them, like all the stars and the galaxies were falling into the room and making their eyes scintillate bright, and Zayn didn’t realise he wasn’t breathing until he blinked and the moment shattered like fine china across the floor and swept away with the autumn wind through the shuffling of the silk curtains.

“Then, we’re fucked. We’re absolutely, superlatively fucked,” he replied. “But we’ll still have this.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s not pretend, Harry.”

“I know, baby, think I have for a while.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Admitting things out loud is always a way to give more intricacy to things,” he said, and kissed Zayn so softly, like he was expensive velvet or tarnished goods, he couldn’t tell, didn’t want to know, didn’t want to care. “Let’s just have this for now, okay? Just this, let’s not complicate it more. Let’s just figure this out for now?”

Zayn nodded, licked his lips, agreed despite his better judgment, despite this profound root down in his chest telling him otherwise, screaming no, screaming that he was a fucking moron.

He let it be; let the ball keep rolling, until it got too fast to stop it.

“Alright,” he muttered, his eyes on Harry’s lips and how kissable they seemed as his tongue pushed out to swipe across them, staring at them when he talked because they always looked so pretty when he talked, because staring at Harry’s lips was easier than looking him in the eyes. And fucking him was even easier.

“That offer is still on the table, by the way.” He pushed his hand across Harry’s back, down to his arse, and back up again. “I’ll let you put my cock in your mouth for free, don’t even need a discount.”

“Thought you said it was a limited time offer.”

He tucked his leg around Harry’s and flipped them over, so he was sat on his chest with his cock half-hard, shifted so his balls were pressed between Harry’s breasts.

“It is,” he said, skimming his fingers into Harry’s mouth, which he sucked with this delight that made his cock twitch. “But it’ll cost you for cuttin’ so close to the deadline.”

“Yeah? What will it cost me, baby?”

He leaned down, took Harry’s jaw between his hands and kissed him roughly. “A sore fuckin’ throat.”

Harry grinned up to him greedily, swallowing the anticipation on his tongue, hissing as Zayn sat back and jerked his cock for a while before leaving him on the edge. Zayn pressed forward with a couple flicks to his slit and brought Harry’s face forward. “Open your mouth.”

Harry did, eagerly so, and Zayn fucked the shit talk from his mouth; the dirty words, and the thoughts of his wife, and filled him with his cum, twice. And somewhere between loud moans and desperate gags that vibrated around his cock, Harry slipped a finger into his asshole for good measure and made legs restless as Zayn fucked in and out of his mouth, hard and fast, and he came again in this long burst of pleasure, with a load that pooled out of Harry’s mouth and over his chin from how perfect the fit  was. 

“I don’t remember you bein’ my little bitch.”

“Baby,” he gasped as he took Zayn out of his mouth with a delicious pop, licking his lips to taste the salt and the sheer intimacy Zayn poured into his orgasm, “I have been for a while.”

  

\+ + + +

 

Zayn skims his hands across the line of fitted suits in Harry’s wardrobe. They sit in their own corner in the walk-in, at the back, watches and jewelries in separate compartments, and a whole cupboard for different ties, the drawers below his knees purely just for shoes—even the cuff links and earrings have their own box.

They’re all for him, all of them. From the Alexander McQueen peacock feather jacquard, to the classic three-piece Tom Ford suit. The embroidered black and gold Gucci suit he wore the night he met Harry’s wife for the first time sits staring at him from the end of the rack, and he traces his fingertips across the fabric with a small smile.

“I had to have that one washed,” Harry says behind him. “Got so dirty in that restroom, there was cum all over the sleeve. Mine, I think.”

“Why is all this here, Harry?” he asks, keeping his back turned. He feels the sting in the bridge of his nose and the quake in his voice, and he tries hard to fight the cowardice in him that tells him to run. “What is all this?”

“It’s yours.” He wraps his arms around Zayn’s waist. “All of it, it’s yours.”

“I have my own clothes, I can afford my own clothes,” he says, before adding in a mumble, “you pay me enough.”

“I know, but do you have your very own collection of tailor-fitted suits? Or a closet of the finest silk ties in the country? Or a whole draw full of all the Rolex’s and rings and diamonds I’ve seen you ogling before?”

“The Tiffany earrings are nice,” he hums, circling his finger over the sensor, and the drawer slides shut. “Rich bastard.”

“I’m a rich bastard who wants to spend money on buying you nice things instead of throwing money to you in a dirty roll, like I have for years,” Harry says. He kisses his cheek and turns him around. “I think it’s time to make changes.”

“I don’t deserve any of this,” Zayn says. “Harry, I don’t fuckin’ deserve any of this. You should just, like, give this to someone better, someone who deserves this more, yeah?”

“There’s no one else more deserving, no one.”

Zayn shakes his head, half-heartedly scoffing through the hurt he wears. “There are thousands.”

“And not one of them is here with me now. You are.” He folds Zayn’s cheeks into his palms and wipes a tear away, kisses him gently and then roughly, until Harry presses him back into the shelf, and Zayn almost forgets his name. “There is no one more deserving in my heart than you, no one. I want you to have these, I bought them for you, and I want you to have a lot more than this, too.”

“I think this is plenty, don’t you?” Zayn says, hysterically breathless, and they laugh. “Don’t think I could do that, don’t think I could want more from you.”

“Not even if _I_ was on the table?”

Zayn looks up to him, into Harry’s gleaming eyes that stare down at him, and his smile vanishes. Before he knows it, he’s pulling away and walking out of the wardrobe and listening to Harry follow him the whole way, his footsteps impending the premise of an argument but the tension holding it at bay with a knife that threatens to cut the moment in half.

“Don’t—don’t say shit like that, Harry,” he weakly warns, his barrier already broken.

“Like what?”

“ _That_ , Harry, don’t act fuckin’ dumb now. Maybe you could have pulled that off when ya followed me back to The Penny to see me for the second time, could’ve told me maybe you didn’t know I was going to be there or some stupid shit ya coulda got away with, but not now.”

“Christ, Zayn, I didn’t know you’d act like this,” he cries, slapping his thighs as his arms rise and fall with a huff. “I thought this was what you wanted.”

“How do you know what I want? Huh? How do you know? You don’t fuckin’ listen to me, ever. It’s never me that gets first priority, it’s never me that’s put in front, so how do you fuckin—” He pauses with a frustrated sigh, calming, before he continues.  “How do you know what I want? ‘Cause I was under the impression that only I knew that type of information.”

“You talk in your sleep.”

Zayn exhales, like he’s been hit in the stomach and winded. “What?”

They stand in silence for a second, and the world seems sink in to itself as Zayn waits for the ground to swallow him whole. He shuts his eyes and waits for it to happen, waits for those thorn-embroidered hands to creep out from the crevice of the earth beneath him and drag his ankles down. Harry’s soft skin pulls him back to earth instead, but it only makes Zayn’s eyes squeeze tighter shut.

“You talk in your sleep, pretty loudly, too,” he says, laughing softly. “You don’t—for fuck sake, Zayn, you don’t have to hide it anymore, alright?”

“Harry,” Zayn begs, shaking his head.

But Harry only holds his arms tighter. “I’ve known for ages, and I’ve been so afraid of what it means. But, seeing you there this morning, God, it scared me even more, and I sort of realised how much of an idiot I’d been to be scared of anything else other than losing you.”

Zayn takes his bottom lip between his teeth before it can tremble. He tries to pull away, but Harry doesn’t let him move anywhere but closer, further into his arms, and his hand falls to Zayn’s cheek to caress the maroon tint of his skin.

The curtain falls, and the world tears apart.

“I don’t want to say it,” Zayn whispers. “Don’t make me say it, please.”

“You don’t have to, it’s okay,” he shushes. “It’s okay, baby, you don’t have to. Don’t say anything.”

“I’ve fucked it all up, I’ve fucked it all up.”

“No, baby, you haven’t. You’ve made it better, you’ve made it so much better.”

He kisses Zayn’s lips, again, and again, until Harry’s tongue is in his mouth and filling the void between them that feels so baron and starved with the things they should have said but never did. Zayn’s fingers link with his soft hair he’s pulled so many times, touches the hips that should be bruised with his name by now, and finally feels the circumferential floodgate around his heart open loose and complete him with the affection he’s been forced to hold back all these years.

He feels free, and light, and _Harry’s_ —God, he feels like Harry’s so much, for the first time, in this house that has a wardrobe filled with his things, and a man whose eyes are so wonderful and bright as they pull away that Zayn would be lost, if it wasn’t for Harry’s touch on his skin.

“I’ve wanted this, for so long,” Harry says, catching is breath. “So fucking long, but things have always got in the way, always gone wrong.”

“Couldn’t have been together,” Zayn mumbles, “you were with her, it was complicated.”

Harry pulls away, shaking his head, as Zayn tries to kiss him again. “It’s been a year.”

“What?”

“Since she left me.”

Zayn falls back flat on his feet. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

It dawns on Zayn for the first time that they’re here alone, that this is the first time he’s been in Harry’s house and not had to sneak in through the back-door garage and up into Harry’s room before anyone can see. And it’s eerily silent, with just the two of them, and the setting sun, and it feels so wrong Zayn can’t focus on how right it is.

“Custody battles?”

“Lost them,” Harry says meekly, eyes to the floor. “Court said the children should have their mother, even though they wanted to stay with me.” He scoffs and brings his eyes up from the ground, all glossy and red all of a sudden.

Harry sits down on the ottoman behind him and pulls Zayn into his lap.

Zayn’s chest hurts just looking at him, and it dawns on him that all those days Harry bailed on him were probably days he spent in court, pushing past tears and trying to remain strong for his children, and no one was there for him, there was no one in his corner, waiting for him at the end of the day to wipe his cheeks and shush him to sleep.

“You hid it so well,” Zayn mutters, wipes the tear that falls across Harry’s skin with the back of his thumb. “A year ago…”

“Russia.”

Zayn’s brows knit. “That’s why we went?”

“That was the day I got the custody papers, the day I picked you up,” he explains. “I just—I just wanted to forget, needed to get away.”

“And I went on at you about—God, I’m so fuckin’ sorry, Harry, fuck. I’ve been so selfish. If I had known…”

“You wouldn’t have been any less selfish,” Harry says, smiling in this bittersweet way that makes him pout. “It’s okay to be selfish. We all think we’re doing what’s right. And at the time I preferred for you to be selfish than to know anymore. It was better than pushing you away.”

“I wouldn’t have stayed away, even if you did push me.”

“I know.”

“Are the kids with _her_?” Zayn asks,

“I have them on weekends, the rest of the time they’re with her, or with her fucking nanny, considering she’s away most of the time,” he grumbles.

“The court thinks they need their mother but she’s away, like, _all the time_. How does that work out?” he says, sarcastic and rolling his eyes.

“That’s what I said, but they didn’t listen. Court is full of a bunch of cunts, always has been. Sura even had the temerity to bring up my infidelity, even though she’s no better than me.” Zayn parts his mouth to speak, but Harry shushes him. “I know what you’re gonna say, it’s not your fault. She didn’t know about you, no one does. It was mostly just false accusations, she couldn’t even get the names of the people I supposedly slept with right, but the court believed her, anyway.”

“What a bunch of cunts.”

Harry sighs, leans against Zayn’s chest. “Tell me about it.”

“You’ve had the kids all weekend?” Zayn asks, and Harry hums. “And I ruined it for you, by being so fuckin’ selfish, _again_.”

Harry playfully grimaces as he looks up to him. “Yeah, you sort of did. Couldn’t think of anything other than you when you didn’t call back. I got so worried.”

“I’m sorry, Harry.”

“It’s okay, Zayn, please don’t put yourself down about it. I’m glad you’re okay, I feel better having you here,” he says, folding himself back into Zayn’s arms.

“Where are the kids now?”

“They’re with their aunt, gone down to Aspen for the holiday.”

“It’s five days until Christmas.”

“It is.”

“You should be with your family, Harry.”

He hums. “It’s a funny one, because some of my family is in Aspen, and others in Manchester, and the rest of it is right here. Where am I supposed to go?”

Zayn’s heart blooms a quick pattern in his chest, and he knows Harry can feel it, feels the smile against the thin fabric of his shirt.

“I’ll rephrase then: you should be with ya children. They need their dad, yeah? Auntie’s are great, but they aren’t enough, trust me.”

“I’ll join them Christmas Eve, can’t be with them until next weekend now, anyway, so.”

He strokes Harry’s hair, kisses his forehead, and smiles at how the tables seemed to have flipped so effortlessly. And it feels good, to have Harry in his arms like this, to be the one caring instead of being cared for. It’s the least Zayn can do for him, he thinks, after everything.

“So?”

“So, you’re stuck with me.” Harry smirks up at him and pulls his lips in. “Stuck in this house, with only me.”

“For the whole week, yeah? You don’t have to pay me, I don’t want you to. Just wanna be here with you,” he mumbles, rocks against Harry’s lap.

He moans. “It could be more than a week, you know that, yeah? This could just be ours.”

“Oh my God.” Zayn chuckles, chin up to the ceiling in a laugh, and Harry sings along with him as he looks down. “Don’t tell me you’re sayin’ what I think you’re sayin’, Harry.”

“Well, what do you think I’m saying?”

“I think you’re sayin’ that you want me to move into this big, posh house with ya, and have a butler clean my shit up, and all that.”

“A butler doesn’t clean, a cleaner does, or, like, a servant, like Mab. She comes on Mondays, Thursday’s, and Sunday’s to clean around.”

“Well, whatever it is then.” He rolls his eyes. “You want me to have all that. It doesn’t seem very me.”

“But it’s very me, and I know you want me, and I want you, so all this extravagant bullshit comes with me,” he says. “It’s a good bargain, you’re not really missing out.”

“I’d be missin’ out on havin’ me own job, and workin’ on me own, and livin’ on me own, and just doin’ stuff on my own, ‘cause I’m sure you wouldn’t let me work anymore.”

“At that dirty place? No, I fucking wouldn’t, you’re right.” He nods, kisses Zayn’s chest as he pops the second button open, hissing gently because Zayn is still rocking on his lap and everything is getting tight and sweaty as the tension builds. “You could stay here all day and do nothing, just do whatever the fuck you want, and let me look after you, let me be your daddy. I know you’d like that, baby.”

“It seems so borin’, though,” he groans out. His fingers in Harry’s hair become vine-like and squeeze, as Harry pushes his arse down harder. “Just doin’ nothing but sittin’ around and spendin’ all the money I want on things I don’t actually need.”

“Oh, that sounds miserable,” Harry mumbles out between kisses to Zayn’s chest, licks to the sensitive peaks of his nipples that leave his skin glistening. “If you lived here, with me, it would be official. You touching anyone else would be cheating.”

“Don’t ya think the situation is already complicated enough?” Zayn asks. “Sort of prefer the whole ‘escort-sugar daddy’ thing.”

“No, you don’t.”

No, he doesn’t. Zayn thinks he’s dreamt of nothing more than this moment for years now; to be held like this, for Harry to willingly say that he is his, to imagine that one day he’d wake up with the mouth of the man he loves more than anything, anyone, around his cock and a moronically expensive, ridiculously high-karat diamond ring around his finger, for his smiles to be happy instead of lustful or false.

But now, he’s just scared, because like most people in life, he’s like a dog who’s caught the cat and doesn’t know what to do with it, thinks it’s too good to be true, because how could something like this happen to someone so unfashionably fucked up like him?

He wants to run, to shout and run away and go back to shagging fifty-year-old men with unorthodox kinks on the side, and not question any of it, because it’s easier that way. It’s easier to run, more difficult to hide but he knows he could do it.

But his heart seems to cement him here, in the moment, with Harry, grinding down on his lap, and questioning the fate of the world outside of this house because it’s all so uncertain that it sort of makes fucking sense, makes it all worth it just to see the smile on Harry’s face when he says ‘okay’.

“I’ve just realised,” Zayn says, as Harry strips his shirt off him and peels away at his trousers, “I didn’t get you anythin’ for Christmas.”

“You think I give a fuck about that, right now, when your cock is this hard, baby?” he asks, dipped down between Zayn’s legs and kissing the points on his thighs that Harry know make him weak.

“No,” he mumbles. “But I do.”

“You’ve got all the time in the week to buy me something, although you couldn’t ever afford anything better than this, don’t think anything better exists.” He trails his finger across Zayn’s groin, flicks his thumb against the tip of his cock and watches it twitch. “Beautiful.”

“It feels like it’s been ages since we did this,” Zayn says, bucking his hips when Harry takes him in his hand. “It’s been too long.”

“It’s been a month.”

“Like I said, too long.”

“I missed you, too.” He leans down to kiss Zayn, mouth parting wide from a tongue.

Zayn drags him down, so one hand is linked at the nape of his neck and ruffles his hair, the other slipping down to undo Harry’s trousers and hastily pull them down his legs, palming him through his boxers before Harry climbs back off the bed and slips them both off to the floor, his cock springing to life, hard and pulsing as Zayn’s eyes watch.

And that line of hair down from his naval to his crotch, God, Zayn just wants to press his mouth there and bruise, run his tongue along the skin and make him shiver.

Harry prowls back onto the bed and sits between his thighs. He presses his fingers down on Zayn’s balls, makes him flinch and hiss, and watches with this methodical smile Zayn’s mouth fall open and clamp shut and open again under the pressure. He dips down slowly, taking Zayn into his mouth, right to the back of his throat, and pops him out again as Zayn thrusts up. He does it again, and again, licks at the edge of his tip in that way he knows Zayn loves, makes the pleasure tingle in his toes and curl over, until the head leaks with precum and he sucks it away.

And the whole time, he sits there, on his knees between Zayn’s shaking legs, watching with this fascinated smirk like he always does, like it’s nothing, not even breaking a sweat. His mouth falls open slightly with Zayn’s, and he pushes his fingers into his mouth before slipping them in Zayn’s arse, pulsing and curling and leaving him undone without an end as he pulls away. He walks over to the chest of drawers on the other side of the room and returns with a pink bottle of lube: raspberry flavoured—Zayn’s favourite.

He sucks his fingers and pops them in and out again, carrying on until Zayn is at the edge, on the verge of crying out his name and painting the wall red with moans, and he leaves him again.

“D’you really wanna tease me now?” Zayn grits out.

“It’s more fun like this, baby.”

“Just come ‘ere, please.” Zayn reaches for him, grabbing at his bicep. “Come here.”

Harry pumps his cock a few times before he climbs back up to him, their cocks brushing as he grinds their hips together.

“I missed you, Harry, I missed you so much.” Zayn moans, his nails digging into Harry’s back. “Can you do me a favour?”

“Anything, baby.”

“Just make love to me,” he requests, and Harry falls still, looks him in the eyes like he’s unsure of what to do, how to move. Zayn kisses him sweetly, slips the hand from his cock and strokes Harry’s cheek, instead. “Just… We don’t have to say it, yeah? We don’t have to say anythin’. We can show it. Let’s—let’s just make love, alright? Officially, for the first time, as two people who could possibly, maybe, sort of, love one another in some fucked up way, somehow. Yeah? Just give me that. I don’t need any fancy earrings or really nice house, they’re bonuses, I just need you. And I need ya to make love to me, right now, and be careful with me… ‘cause I’m sort of fragile and all cut up on me arms, and they’re really fuckin’ sore.”

Harry kisses him back, tucks his arm underneath Zayn’s back and kneels on his elbows. He brings Zayn’s right leg over his hip and brings them closer, impossibly closer, together.

“Okay,” he whispers in a pant. “Okay, baby, I got you. I’ll always have you, okay? I got you.”

“Harry,” he whines out, grasping at him with desperate hands. “Fucking hell, Harry.”

He sits up and hands Zayn the bottle. “Put the lube on me, yeah? Stroke me.”

Zayn squirts the lube on his hand and rolls it over Harry’s cock, stroking and leaning down to kiss the slit and be pulled back up to Harry’s lips in a firm grip; he takes the remainder and rubs it over his arse and the side of his thighs, and lays back down on the bed. Harry falls back over him, lips at his neck, legs wrapped around his waist as Harry eases inside of him.

“God, baby,” Harry breaths out, lapping up Zayn’s moans as they fall from his mouth. “You’re so perfect, so perfect.”

“Harry, Harry,” he chants out, his name falling through the gaps in his teeth with each thrust, each rock of the bed as Harry slowly picks up the speed.

It’s strange, how the bed frame doesn’t hit against the wall like it usually does in that Hilton hotel room that seems so scrappy now compared to Harry’s king-sized bed with the silk sheets and the embroidered cushions and the steady headboard that doesn’t move, no matter how fast they go, no matter how quick they slow down, no matter what high they fall from.

And they go, for what seems like hours, until the sky has turned dark, and most of the sheets are falling on the floor, and the beside lamp has already found its way there through Zayn’s hasty grabs for something stable to hold onto as Harry turns him over on his front and fucks into him so gently and yet so firm that he comes loose in minutes, and the walls drip with stencils of their names and their love in technicolor tempo.

Zayn wipes the sweat from Harry’s forehead and pushes his damp hair behind his ears. Their pants intertwine as their lips do, and Harry pushes his face down into Zayn’s neck, pressing hot kisses and nips to his skin.

“Oh, Harry, I’m gonna fuckin’ cum,” Zayn gasps, his legs quaking and his feet bending in, as Harry hits that spot that’s _so fucking sweet_ inside him, that unravels him completely, that makes him cry out as he cums, convulses in pleasure over and over again with bursts of Harry’s name, and he’s seeing stars on the ceiling like it’s the night sky and falling back down into Harry’s arms. “God, Harry, I love you. I love you so fuckin’ much, Harry."  

Harry calls his name out as he cums, with these muffles that sound more like love confessions into the sweat of his neck, but Zayn says nothing. He only smiles as he watches Harry orgasm around him, fall flat onto his chest with pants and sighs that cool the perspiration over his skin.

“I thought we agreed that we weren’t going to say that.”

Harry rolls over to lay beside him but keeps their skin alive with each other’s touch, in ways it means the most to Zayn, always has—like the way he likes his chest tickled, right down the centre, or having his feet intertwined with whoever he’s lay next to, or the kisses to his palms and his fingers and his knuckles— Harry remembers, does them all the time, touches him in some small way that reminds Zayn he isn’t alone, even after the years.

“Made me cum, though.”

“Yeah? You like the sound of it?”

“Yeah,” he mumbles, eyes glazed over and a lazy smile on his face as he turns on his side to look at Zayn. “You look very beautiful like this.”

“What, all sweaty and fucked out?”

He bites his lip. “In my bed, yeah. Could get used to this, too. I’ve been wanting to get you back here since the first time you were here, in my sheets, but it was always too risky, always someone around, you know? But there’s no one here, anymore. Just us.”

“Now, that’s something I _could_ get used to.” Zayn smirks, shuffles over so he’s close enough to be embraced in Harry’s arms, lay his head down on Harry’s chest and feel the softening beat of his heart, feel that it’s just for him. “And these silk blankets, actually. They’re really comfy.”

“Should be, for how expensive they are. I think this one might be ruined, though. There’s a lot of your cum on it now.”

“It’ll come off in the wash,” Zayn says, “put a bit of fairy liquid on the stains before you throw it in the wash, good as new.”

“You’ll have to tell Mab that one.”

“Right.” He pushes his head further into Harry’s chest, and the arms around his waist hold him there so he won’t fall away, get too cold without each other’s touch. “I’m going to be here that long, right? To tell Mab?”

“‘Course you are, I’m not letting you go now. I’ve already made the decision, and now I’ve got to stick to it,” Harry says, before he reiterates, “not that it’s something I feel like I _have to_ stick to, you know? Because that’s not the case. I want you here, a lot, all the time, with me, I just have a tendency to run away from things when they get too emotionally tough.”

“I know, Harry, don’t worry,” he assures with a smile. He twirls his fingers around the tattoos on Harry’s chest, his arms, and this tranquil silence envelops this safe space they’ve branded their own, and life finally gives them _their_ moment. He glances around the room and watches everything turn back to hue, watches life pool back into everything his eyes roam, and the light in his heart makes the shadow in the corners disappear. “Russia is still ours, yeah?”  

“Of course it is, darling, always will be, I promise.” Zayn plants his lips over Harry’s chest, his neck as he lifts his head up, and Harry perks his head to the side, so he can reach his jaw. Harry mumbles in content, takes Zayn’s painted cheeks into his hands and brings them together, and the world outside quakes at the love between them, like the balance of life equalises between their lips as they connect.

“The world is ours, now,” he says as they break away.

“Yeah,” Zayn whispers back, kissing away the bite on Harry’s lips and falling back down into his arms.

He closes his eyes just to take in the moment, to feel the immersive warmth of Harry’s touch, thankful to the blossom in his chest that, in its prospering premise, doesn’t wither or turn frail at the seams but instead blooms in his chest, like a flower that Harry graciously waters.

He slowly drifts to sleep whilst Harry sings in his ears, and as the world around him begins to blur into distant sounds and soft breaths, he hears the beacon of Harry’s voice whisper out into the darkness that he loves him, completely and with all his heart.

 

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr — blueghosts.


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